Control the network is the king!

(Reed · Hoffman）

Hoffman is Facebook's first angel investor and founder of the world's third-largest social networking network, LinkedIn.

"In Silicon Valley, if you want to start a business, Hoffman is the first person you should be looking for."

Investment Zuckerberg

In the fall of 2004, the oak trees along the Dunes Road of Monroe Park in the United States were like giant golden umbrellas. Reid Hoffman (Reid Hoffman) leads Harvard sophomore student Mark Mark Zuckerberg into an ordinary office. Hoffman's PayPal ex-colleague, VC-man Peter F. Tyre (Peter Thiel) is waiting for them.

Zuckerberg, who was not wearing a suit, short-sleeved shirt, jeans, and Adidas ' rubber flip-flops, sat down on the couch in meditation, answering a few questions, and then staring blankly at Hoffman and Tyre.

When I mentioned Mr Zuckerberg's first sight, Hoffman smiled at me. On the 26th floor of the Liangmaqiao Four Seasons Hotel in Beijing on the afternoon of May 24, sitting on a brown soft leather couch, Hoffman shook up his investment cheats and mixed in some Silicon Valley gossip.

Hoffman is Facebook's first angel investor and founder of the world's third-largest social network, LinkedIn, and his name in Silicon Valley because of PayPal, the payment platform. In Silicon Valley there is a prestigious entrepreneurial and angel investor group called the PayPal Mob (PayPal Mafia), Hoffman is one of his spiritual leaders.

"In Silicon Valley if you want to start a business, Hoffman is the first person you should be looking for." "LinkedIn co-founder, vice president of product design Allen Blue, in an interview with Bloomberg, said.

When Mr. Zuckerberg first began his career as a social networking site for more than a year, LinkedIn's users were close to 1 million, and he thought social media was the trend. At that time, Zuckerberg's campus dating network, Facebook, has gathered 200,000 users in less than half a year, but has faced funding problems. Hoffman and Tyre are considering whether to give the young man a sum of money.

Zuckerberg did not put on airs, and he said a few simple ideas, such as adding wirehog to the Community sharing service on Facebook, to make it truly picture-sharing. This impressed Hoffman and Tyre and decided to invest 500,000 of dollars. Facebook was listed on Nasdaq in 2012, and the 500,000 dollars became one of the most visionary investments in Silicon Valley's history, with a 20,000 times-fold rise in the decade. As of June 27, 2014, its market capitalisation reached $172.3 billion trillion, with users exceeding 1 billion, ahead of a new generation of Silicon Valley companies.

"Zuckerberg has almost all the qualities of a good entrepreneur, he has a very good product feel and technical skills, and grows fast and he deserves to invest." "said Hoffman. Over the past decade, he has invested 140 start-ups, including Facebook, Groupon, Zynga, Airbnb, Flickr, and Digg, 80% of which have a "social" nature. He is now a partner in America's top VC Greylock Partner, and a director of 8 companies such as Shopkick, Wrapp and Edmodo, a social new favorite in Silicon Valley.

"What can I do for you?" is usually the first thing that Hoffman says when he meets everyone. The $3.1 billion trillion, dubbed Forbes magazine as the world's most powerful and Silicon Valley's most well-connected VC, has always had a better-without personality. In 2013, he was the President of the United States President Barack Obama Marchin point for the global entrepreneurial spirit of the Special envoy to help entrepreneurs create and develop enterprises.

Hoffman smiled shyly, and he did not deny that he had mastered some know-how when he spoke of his own success. As the TED conference (the world's leading technology, entertainment, design sharing platform) and the famous American talk show "Charlie A frequent visitor to Ross's interview, he summed up his 20 years of entrepreneurial and investment experience in Silicon Valley as a "cyber-man."

When Hoffman walks into an office, the sense of feeling will emerge. What he sees is not ghosts, but networking. He gets 40 business plans and 700 emails a day from the Greylock office in Mountain View and a few kilometres away from Monroe Park.

"Not all entrepreneurs can be good investors," he said, raising his head, "must have a broad network of contacts and learn from successful entrepreneurs, sometimes with investment opportunities around." "Hoffman's investment mistakes are few, but not always." He admits that the development of five or six companies is unsatisfactory. "But it's always right to invest." He said in silence for a moment.

Controlling connections equals controlling everything.

In Silicon Valley, there is a word among entrepreneurs: "You and Reid Did Hoffman talk?

On the morning of the interview, Hoffman 6:30, breakfast is the northeast dumplings. As the founder and chairman of LinkedIn, he had a lecture at the Four Seasons Hotel at 9. A few days ago, he received a call from an entrepreneur. On the phone, the entrepreneur introduced himself to Hoffman and wanted an investment.

After putting the phone down, Hoffman immediately contacted several of the references mentioned by the entrepreneur to verify the situation. Convinced that this person is reliable, in less than two days, Wednesday agreed to a cooperation agreement, Thursday, Hoffman has arrived in China.

The 46-Year-old, tall, 190cm, California big man, with his heart wide body fat four words to describe more accurately. In the past 20 years, Hoffman has performed a Silicon Valley Wolf Totem: Whether you want to start a business or invest in it, you have everything you need to know.

Entrepreneurs look for him, some to get his investment, some to listen to advice, some to get his connections, and more often, to get inspired by his sensitivity to the tech industry. The fat guy has a huge stream of gas in his bones. "I don't know what the opposite of a social person is," he said in an interview with Forbes, a co-founder of venture capital, a friend of Hoffman's. According to data from the Center for Venture study, the US has 318,480 active "Angels" in 2011, with a total of 66,230 companies, of which 60% are from technology, such as the Internet, which has doubled twice times in 10 years. According to the Silicon Valley technology investment Report, the angel investment in Silicon Valley reached 31.5 billion dollars in 2013 alone.

Angels invest more idealism than their big, high-risk, high-return VCS. The return is not high, the risk is big. A report from the Venture Capital Research Center at New Hampshire University says more than half of angel investment cases in 2011 years are floating. "Godfather of Silicon Valley", Google angel investor Ron Conway (Ron Conway) even portrayed his investment as charity. It's angel investment that keeps Silicon Valley's innovation alive, says Hoffman. His 2012 bestseller, "Vital Relationship", start-up to remind people of how Detroit has failed in the absence of innovative energy.

"If a company can get millions of people involved in the action of changing their lives, that is the greatest return on investment." "said Hoffman. "Hoffman always thinks about business from a social level," said Kato Ito, Joi Ito, a friend of Hoffman's Media lab, who interviewed the British version of Wired magazine. "If the entrepreneurs of gates, jobs and Zuckerberg are Dreamers, Hoffman is the one who provides mattresses for dreamers, but it's very practical," he said.

Paypal Mob

The door opened the moment, that help "evil Han" cast a cold eyes. The table was littered with glass and poker, and a huge Renaissance oil painting hung on the wall. Without photographers, people may have strayed into the Italian mafia party. It was the fall of 2007, a cover film from Fortune magazine.

These "aggressive" guys in the picture are destined to be one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious gangs, all of whom have worked for PayPal, an electronic payment company, and have a fanciful name: the PayPal mob.

Hoffman sits on a red velvet couch in the middle of the photo, and the brown hair is combed neatly behind his head. His expression was assured, and a gold necklace loomed in the open neckline. In front of the seat is tyre, with a thick black hair, max · Leo (Max Levchin) is the founder of the website Slide, Elon · Musk (Elon Musk) created the American Space Exploration Company (SpaceX) and Tesla Motor, and Steve (Steve Chen) co-founded the social video website YouTube, David Sax (David Sacks) is the founder of corporate customer social networking site Yam m e r ... In addition to investment, PayPal gang members also created dozens of companies alone, so far the total value of nearly 30 billion U.S. dollars.

"If Tyre is not my friend, without PayPal, my fate may never change." Hoffman shrugged. 14 years ago, Hoffman met the first adversity of his life. Born in the gifted intellectual family, graduated from Stanford University and Oxford University philosophy department, life has been smooth. He always wants to be able to do something to change the world.

"I've always been interested in how to create good public and private spaces with Internet services," he said. How do people build the right connections through social networks, "Hoffman told Businessweek/Chinese edition." He thinks social networks simulate people's social attributes: dating. As a result, Hoffman, who resigned from Apple in 1997, founded a dating service website, socialnet, which was thought to be the embryonic form of a social networking site, when Zuckerberg was still in junior high. Socialnet is commercially unsustainable due to the lack of search applications.

"I made a call to Hoffman, who was very frustrated. ' said Tyre in a Bloomberg interview. It was the summer of 1998, when Tyre and Max were planning to make the electronic wallet PayPal, and he invited Hoffman, who had failed in the venture, to join the company. A fund company operating in Tyre will provide 20,000 of dollars in start-up funds. Hoffman agreed and became a director and COO of the payment services Department.

Progress is not smooth sailing. In the spring of 2000, the grandfather's home on the northern coast of California, Hoffman, Tyre, and Max and Elon took a risk. At that time, PayPal was just relying on the Palm PDA handheld computer trading software. When PayPal started to burn money quickly, they realized that the internet had changed people's pay habits. "We decided to give up the PDA and embrace the Internet, which is the only chance." Hoffman said.

Hoffman believes that risk-taking is an important feature of PayPal gangs, "at that time in the Internet to do the financial platform is the bank would not think of things, but just by a group of people do not understand the financial." "he said. This spirit of risk-taking was later reflected in Hoffman's own entrepreneurial and investment philosophy.

This moment also became the origin of the PayPal gang owners. Not only did they reap friendship, they also established a unique network.

"PayPal gangs are a very effective network. Hoffman explains. In the fiercely competitive Silicon Valley, gangs embody the best networking features: long-term operations. At the end of 2001, PayPal was bought for 1.5 billion dollars by EBay, and members were leaving to start their own businesses or invest in other companies. Although they are mostly liberals who rely strongly on their own senses and judgments, they still meet regularly, and whoever has financial difficulties will help each other.

Hoffman gave himself a long vacation in 2002. At that time, the dotcom bubble, which had just experienced the beginning of 2000 years, had a lingering fear of internet companies. He paced the beaches of Australia, thinking about two questions. One is that capital is turning to software and clean energy technology, but ignores the prospects of consumer companies. The second is that there are two possibilities for social networking: personal applications and business applications, and the latter's market is blank, perhaps the best time to build a career social networking site. He decided to take a risk. But in the face of Bubbles, the new company is not going to get any investment at all.

Hoffman first thought of Tyre. At that time, Tyre's fund company had done a good job, he immediately expressed support and provided the first round of financing. In the last week of November 2002, Hoffman used his connections to summon 7 former colleagues from Socialnet and PayPal. The next day, a line of people took a mobile phone and a computer to move into a shabby office in Mountain View, a friend of Hoffman's just moved out of town the night before. Hoffman printed a poster emblazoned with "LinkedIn" on the wall as a sign of the company. It wasn't until the fifth year that LinkedIn became profitable. "Whether an enterprise can grow depends on what value it creates," Hoffman said, "Talking about business, consulting, sharing knowledge, finding a job, the network platform as long as 1 million people will succeed." "

In addition to LinkedIn, Tyre's VC fund is also involved in early investment by many PayPal gangs such as SpaceX, Yelp, and Yammer. Hoffman is also involved in some of the investments and often advises other members on product design.

The PayPal gang deepened Hoffman's understanding of the network. He began to think about how high quality relationships should be and how to find allies. British anthropologist Robin · Dunbar has suggested that human intelligence determines a stable social network of only 150 people. Despite Hoffman's cult of the numbers, "There are often only 8 to 10 people in deep connections that can be allies and deserve long-term investment." "said Hoffman. He summed up the success of PayPal gangs in his book: "Quality talent, common ties, sharing and cooperation in the atmosphere, gathered in the same region or industry, these characteristics make the opportunity to flow quickly." "

Hoffman wrote a number of academic papers on social networking for magazines such as business strategy, and put forward a series of theories. In the vital relationship, he strongly advocated John F. Pierpont · Morgan (John Pierpont Morgan). The outstanding investment banker of the early 20th century, when he died, was a member of 24 different associations. Silicon Valley, like Wall Street, is having sex all the time. But whether for business, love or friendship, everything is built on a reliable relationship.

PayPal gangs are a sample of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial community. Silicon Valley is a typical entrepreneurial ecosystem, the Economist said in an article in the Science and technology Special edition of the Cretaceous (a Cambrian Moment) earlier this year. Entrepreneurs, law firms, and investors work together to create a complex and reliable network. Professor Tom at Harvard Business School Eisenmann (Tom Eisenmanne), a network of Facebook-like effects, even a 25,000-dollar angel investment could push companies such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn into the history arena. When the enterprise enters the growth period, can attract the VC to carry on the large-scale financing.